With the news that the Electoral Commission is hand-wringingly apologetic about allowing the right wing Britain First movement to allow the slogan "Remember Lee Rigby" on its local election ballot papers, the thought strikes me (not for the first time) that not many people seem to be bothered about free speech any more.
The fate of Lee Rigby, hacked to death in Woolwich by Islamic fundamentalists, was grisly, ghastly and undeserved. In my opinion his death deserves to be remembered, and not just by Britain First (whoever they are); but on the other hand there'll be people who think Rigby was an agent of a corrupt and warlike state who got what was coming to him. And all shades of opinion in between. That's pluralism.
While I might find distasteful an attempt to make political capital out of Rigby's death, I wouldn't dream of standing in the way of any political party that wanted to do so. If freedom means anything, it means the freedom to say things that other people don't like.
So many of my fellow liberals seem to think that freedom means being able to say things that they themselves more or less agree with.
Extremists are defeated when people can see what they stand for and don't support them. Telling them what they can and can't put on the ballot paper merely helps turn Britain into the kind of country they claim it is already - one where ordinary people's voices are stifled, a kind of liberal police state where free expression is thwarted. People should be able to judge for themselves what Britain First are about and decide whether to vote for them accordingly.
This seems so self-evident to me that the really shocking thing is not that a loony Right party should use Rigby's death as a gory rallying flag, but that the press can report the Electoral Commission's embarrassment without the hint of a suggestion that there might be something undemocratic about it.
Monday 28 April 2014
Wednesday 23 April 2014
Sympathy for the fundamentalists
Events in Birmingham suggest an Islamist plot to take over state schools. I'm not a natural supporter of anything concerning Islam, a religion which I think on the whole treats women pretty poorly, but I would like to spare a thought today for the beleaguered men of Allah.
In the first place, pressure groups of all kinds are at liberty to try and get themselves elected onto school governing boards. It's a thankless job done generally by the middle-class great and good (my wife does it). Why shouldn't Islamists have a go? There's nothing, as far as I'm concerned, preventing any organisation - boy scouts, naturists, the Woodcraft Folk, Morris dancers et al - from trying to do the same thing.
No, my objection lies with the people who are surprised that this is happening. In the first place, how dare they object when people try and get involved with local democracy. That's their right! Second, the objectors - Labour councillors who run Birmingham Council - are precisely the kind of people whose open door immigration policy invited the Islamic hardliners in to start with.
If you allow in an awful lot of people from a relatively small rural part of Pakistan (surprisingly, most of them from the area surrounding the town of Mirpur), you are going to find that population will pretty quickly start demanding that political and social rules come to reflect the mores and norms of the society they've left behind. Who can blame them?
And what norms those are. Muslims, extremist or otherwise, have radically different views about the role of religion in society, about the extent to which religion should dominate the individual's life, about the extent to which an individual should be free to marry whom they choose, about whether people can have sex before marriage, about whether women can go out to work or interact freely with other British people, about the way women should dress, about relations between husbands and their wives, about which legal system should govern their affairs, about women's right to enjoy sex without being hacked about, and even about the right of women to inherit money.
The idea that Muslims, extremist or otherwise, might want these cultural practices to be reflected in some way in the kind of things children should be taught at school seems to have come as a shock to some people. Not to me. It's inevitable, and all the more so when you dish out quite large sums of money to "community" groups, encouraging migrants to regard themselves as a self-contained pocket of the Asian sub-continent rather than New Britons.
I don't blame the Islamic fundamentalists for having a go. It's the people who brought them to Britain who need to have a look in the mirror.
In the first place, pressure groups of all kinds are at liberty to try and get themselves elected onto school governing boards. It's a thankless job done generally by the middle-class great and good (my wife does it). Why shouldn't Islamists have a go? There's nothing, as far as I'm concerned, preventing any organisation - boy scouts, naturists, the Woodcraft Folk, Morris dancers et al - from trying to do the same thing.
No, my objection lies with the people who are surprised that this is happening. In the first place, how dare they object when people try and get involved with local democracy. That's their right! Second, the objectors - Labour councillors who run Birmingham Council - are precisely the kind of people whose open door immigration policy invited the Islamic hardliners in to start with.
If you allow in an awful lot of people from a relatively small rural part of Pakistan (surprisingly, most of them from the area surrounding the town of Mirpur), you are going to find that population will pretty quickly start demanding that political and social rules come to reflect the mores and norms of the society they've left behind. Who can blame them?
And what norms those are. Muslims, extremist or otherwise, have radically different views about the role of religion in society, about the extent to which religion should dominate the individual's life, about the extent to which an individual should be free to marry whom they choose, about whether people can have sex before marriage, about whether women can go out to work or interact freely with other British people, about the way women should dress, about relations between husbands and their wives, about which legal system should govern their affairs, about women's right to enjoy sex without being hacked about, and even about the right of women to inherit money.
The idea that Muslims, extremist or otherwise, might want these cultural practices to be reflected in some way in the kind of things children should be taught at school seems to have come as a shock to some people. Not to me. It's inevitable, and all the more so when you dish out quite large sums of money to "community" groups, encouraging migrants to regard themselves as a self-contained pocket of the Asian sub-continent rather than New Britons.
I don't blame the Islamic fundamentalists for having a go. It's the people who brought them to Britain who need to have a look in the mirror.
Tuesday 22 April 2014
RIP David Moyes
Just like one of those old cowboy stories where the hero knows from the circling vultures up ahead that something bad has happened - the homestead sacked, the stagecoach waylaid - we the public have been able to tell from the sententiously regretful newspaper articles about the Manchester United manager's debut season that something bad was going on behind the scenes at Old Trafford. And now we have ridden around a bend in the draw to find the denouement laid out before us - yesterday David Moyes was "to be sacked"; today the tense has changed to "has been". The owners announced it on Twitter.
So United turn out to be just like any other club. The illusion fostered during the long years of Fergie's success that Man U were somehow different - the trope that the boardroom had stuck with the irascible Glaswegian during three years of mediocrity, had reaped the benefits of that stability and were going to pursue the same policy with the new man - is now gone. As is glassy-eyed Fergie Lite. Now United are going to be scrabbling around for someone with the Midas touch just like everyone else. How Jose Mourinho must be laughing this morning.
Whose fault is all this? Not much of it is David Moyes'. He inherited a squad whose young players (many of them fostered by Ferguson) weren't good enough, and whose good players were getting too old. Rio Ferdinand is so slow now that Moyes himself could probably run faster. The fear that used to inhibit opponents and referees went when Ferguson did. There have been perhaps more injuries than usual. Some players haven't stepped up, which is unprofessional and an insult to the fans.
None of these things could be laid at Moyes' door.
There have no doubt been individual decisions Moyes got wrong, although no-one will ever be able to prove that. The summer failures in the transfer window might be partly to do with him, although surely the board must take some responsibility for failing to spend big when it was so evidently needed. But that's been true for several years now.
Which brings us to the Glazers. The Americans borrowed massively against the security of the club in order to buy it, and have transformed it from one with negligible debt to one massively in hock to the banks. It beggars belief that that change in ownership had no effect on United's ability to buy world beating new stars.
Actually David Moyes inherited a club that desperately needed an infusion of new talent. That's the fault of its owners. The same people who sacked the manager this morning. As I was saying, that's the vultures you can hear Twittering.
PS - As for the much-hyped managerial credentials of the journalists' darling Ryan Giggs, I would bet a hefty sum that when he turns to management he'll be as rubbish as so many other former stars. Giggs strikes me as a bit thick, which won't help, but doesn't preclude success in the dugout. No, the reason I think he'll fail is for the simple statistical fact that most people do. Individuals like David Moyes, humiliated as he now is, are exceptional in being able to do the job at all. People like Mourinho and Ferguson are rare as hen's teeth.
So United turn out to be just like any other club. The illusion fostered during the long years of Fergie's success that Man U were somehow different - the trope that the boardroom had stuck with the irascible Glaswegian during three years of mediocrity, had reaped the benefits of that stability and were going to pursue the same policy with the new man - is now gone. As is glassy-eyed Fergie Lite. Now United are going to be scrabbling around for someone with the Midas touch just like everyone else. How Jose Mourinho must be laughing this morning.
Whose fault is all this? Not much of it is David Moyes'. He inherited a squad whose young players (many of them fostered by Ferguson) weren't good enough, and whose good players were getting too old. Rio Ferdinand is so slow now that Moyes himself could probably run faster. The fear that used to inhibit opponents and referees went when Ferguson did. There have been perhaps more injuries than usual. Some players haven't stepped up, which is unprofessional and an insult to the fans.
None of these things could be laid at Moyes' door.
There have no doubt been individual decisions Moyes got wrong, although no-one will ever be able to prove that. The summer failures in the transfer window might be partly to do with him, although surely the board must take some responsibility for failing to spend big when it was so evidently needed. But that's been true for several years now.
Which brings us to the Glazers. The Americans borrowed massively against the security of the club in order to buy it, and have transformed it from one with negligible debt to one massively in hock to the banks. It beggars belief that that change in ownership had no effect on United's ability to buy world beating new stars.
Actually David Moyes inherited a club that desperately needed an infusion of new talent. That's the fault of its owners. The same people who sacked the manager this morning. As I was saying, that's the vultures you can hear Twittering.
PS - As for the much-hyped managerial credentials of the journalists' darling Ryan Giggs, I would bet a hefty sum that when he turns to management he'll be as rubbish as so many other former stars. Giggs strikes me as a bit thick, which won't help, but doesn't preclude success in the dugout. No, the reason I think he'll fail is for the simple statistical fact that most people do. Individuals like David Moyes, humiliated as he now is, are exceptional in being able to do the job at all. People like Mourinho and Ferguson are rare as hen's teeth.
Thursday 10 April 2014
Maria Miller - brazening it out.
So Maria Miller has gone. Predictable enough I suppose. I don't have any feelings either way about Ms Miller, who seems neither to have behaved desperately badly nor terribly well. Most of the general public will greet the news with a shrug - another politician who may or may not have had her snout in the trough. She was cleared of the charges brought against her, but found to have been unco-operative with the investigation. "Legalistic" was the term used. That's what happens when your husband is a solicitor.
The real reason Ms Miller has resigned however is that, rightly or wrongly, she became the subject of a rolling news story. You can see the way it works. Journalists have 24 hour news programmes to fill, and no journalist ever made a reputation by saying, "You know what, I don't think this is a very big story". The news is full of "Growing pressure on Mrs Miller to quit", omitting to say that the pressure is coming from journalists themselves. Eventually someone from No.10 rings up and says, "You know what Maria, I think it would be better if you went".
The next phase is that journalists then reflect on the process they themselves have put in train (I saw a feature on Sky news yesterday in which Kay Burley went through a timeline of David Cameron's supportive pre-resignation utterances; and of course disgruntled back-benchers are always happy to put in their two penn'orth, on or off the record, to keep things spicy).
So journalists win at both ends of the story. They win by rehashing stories about the hapless politician, thus applying pressure which generally forces a resignation. Then when the resignation has happened they run another series of stories about the political processes involved and the fault lines it reveals in the MP's party.
Most fatuously of all, a few years down the line the politician makes a come back. Look at Peter Mandelson. Look at David Laws, who resigned as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2010 over an expenses scandal, spent two years on the backbenches and has now returned as a minister in the Department of Education. Where was the outcry in the press at Laws's return to Government? Curiously, the press isn't anything like as interested in the returning sinners. And Maria Miller will be back herself, I'd bet my last penny.
This is pretty much the acme of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
At PMQs yesterday Ed Miliband laid into David Cameron. Perhaps because the TV in the gym had the sound turned down, my attention was drawn to the figures on either side of Mr Miliband. One was Ed Balls. The other was Harriet Harman. It was Harman, you will remember, who was under the media spotlight not long ago because in her capacity as Legal Officer of the NCCL she associated with an organisation which thought it was OK for adults to have sex with children. And yet there she was, nodding sanctimoniously along with her leader. Now that's how to brazen it out.
The real reason Ms Miller has resigned however is that, rightly or wrongly, she became the subject of a rolling news story. You can see the way it works. Journalists have 24 hour news programmes to fill, and no journalist ever made a reputation by saying, "You know what, I don't think this is a very big story". The news is full of "Growing pressure on Mrs Miller to quit", omitting to say that the pressure is coming from journalists themselves. Eventually someone from No.10 rings up and says, "You know what Maria, I think it would be better if you went".
The next phase is that journalists then reflect on the process they themselves have put in train (I saw a feature on Sky news yesterday in which Kay Burley went through a timeline of David Cameron's supportive pre-resignation utterances; and of course disgruntled back-benchers are always happy to put in their two penn'orth, on or off the record, to keep things spicy).
So journalists win at both ends of the story. They win by rehashing stories about the hapless politician, thus applying pressure which generally forces a resignation. Then when the resignation has happened they run another series of stories about the political processes involved and the fault lines it reveals in the MP's party.
Most fatuously of all, a few years down the line the politician makes a come back. Look at Peter Mandelson. Look at David Laws, who resigned as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2010 over an expenses scandal, spent two years on the backbenches and has now returned as a minister in the Department of Education. Where was the outcry in the press at Laws's return to Government? Curiously, the press isn't anything like as interested in the returning sinners. And Maria Miller will be back herself, I'd bet my last penny.
This is pretty much the acme of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
At PMQs yesterday Ed Miliband laid into David Cameron. Perhaps because the TV in the gym had the sound turned down, my attention was drawn to the figures on either side of Mr Miliband. One was Ed Balls. The other was Harriet Harman. It was Harman, you will remember, who was under the media spotlight not long ago because in her capacity as Legal Officer of the NCCL she associated with an organisation which thought it was OK for adults to have sex with children. And yet there she was, nodding sanctimoniously along with her leader. Now that's how to brazen it out.
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